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Let me second the call for using StackOverflow as a sterling example. SO gets a lot of things right

1. Q&A should be just that. Right now, Moz has a forum, not a Q&A. Forums are great (I got started years ago, like, Rand did, on SEOChat) but they also promote a LOT of noise and force you to find the signal somewhere. Moz avoids some of that by being a gated forum, but it's still a forum.

2. Community moderation. It's amazing to see SO empowers its valued (as measured by reputation, their version of MozPoints). It helps filter out the noise and get you more signal.

3. Better syntax. Right now, adding a link to Q&A is PAINFUL. Formatting is equally painful. Spacing, highlighting, quoting... Moz does none of these well. You're using Tiny MCE to build HTML. SO uses Markdown. It takes some getting used to, but I rarely struggle to do what I want. Try adding two returns and then deleting one in Moz...

4. Editing. SO keeps EVERYTHING. And it versions edits. Right now, all the edits do is "Edited by XXX on YYY". Versioning helps a TON, especially if someone edits the question to change the meaning.

isapi_rewrite is the older IIS version of Apache's mod_rewrite. But, like CMS systems, Microsoft realized it was a gaping hole in their platform and released an official (and free) version of what they call URL Rewrite. Only works with IIS 7.0 or later but it removes the excuse of why IIS hosted sites can't do rewrites.

I have to admire a post that starts out with a warning that it's tl;dr (and ends with amazement if you finished it). Lots of interesting data and supposition.

I think you're a bit too generous to Google in this line, however

I firmly believe that Penguin 1.0 had a much broader, and possibly much more negative, impact on SERPs than Google believed it would, and I think they’ve genuinely struggled to fix and update the Penguin algorithm effectively.

Panda has become something more of a known quantity. It's easy to understand poor content and how it affects your SERPs. Avoiding Panda isn't terribly hard (and my company benefited greatly). But Penguin is a different animal (no pun intended). When Penguin rolled out I initially thought it was one of Google's broad tests. The reason was that normally high quality SERPs (for even uncompetitive terms) went down the drain. I remember in the earliest days that I become so frustrated with Google returning bad results for searches I had to turn to Bing in some cases. Surely, I thought, this was a mistake of some sort. Google wouldn't swing its sword to cut spam and cut itself in the process. But that appears to be exactly what has happened.

Penguin hasn't gone away. It's stayed (with a vengeance) and I believe it did what Google wanted it to: it turned the SEO industry on its head. I believe that Penguin was more than a link spam tool; it was also designed to obfuscate their algorithm even more. That we're 2 years out and we still don't have any idea how Penguin works speaks volumes. That is can still be easier to launch a new site than to try and clean up a Penguin penalized site also speaks volumes. That you can now get penalized for otherwise benign behavior and not have any chance to recover in a reasonable time... I empathized with Search Engine land when they called for Google to remove Penguin. You're currently better off getting a manual penalty than getting hit by Penguin.

I think you're right in that Google doesn't know what to do with it (or, more accurately, how to make it move at the speed of Internet instead of the speed of government). They've changed the SEO landscape and apparently done so permanently. But they don't seem to know how to control the beast they've turned loose into the wild. But it's disturbing that Google is willing to harm sites to make a point.

In 2004 I was first tasked at my new job to figure out this SEO thing and how to make Google like our sites. I ran across SEO Chat (#1 SEO forum at the time) and this guy who went by the name "randfish". His avatar was yellow shoes (handlebar mustaches were not a thing yet). He was very insightful and kept posting these handy (and free) tools (I remember using a very early version of Open Site Explorer). Wound up being an early adopter of Moz Pro.

First is make sure that your site is patched against the Heartbleed bug (XKCD has an awesome non-technical explaination). This was a major vulnerability in OpenSSL, an open source software that just about everything uses to process SSL. While a lot of servers got patched, there are still vulnerable servers out there. It doesn't hurt to make sure yours isn't one of them.

Second, you might get asked if you want SHA1 or SHA2. You should pick SHA2, as SHA1 has a cryptographic weakness. The downside to SHA2 is that older machines won't verify it. Mostly this applies to Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 3 (as of right now, about 30% of all internet traffic is still from Windows XP). If someone tells you your shiny new SHA2 certificate is invalid, this is why.

Third, while referrers come back with HTTPS, don't expect keyword data to return. You can see this for yourself. Here's a Google Search. Find the Rusty Brick link (was #3 for me). You need to click the link to get the referrer and that page will show you your referrer data. You'll note there's no keyword data in the referrer.

Just a small note on thisThe tool David linked is indeed very useful but all it is is a nice, neat form to create a URL shortener (like the video says, utm_source isn't sexy) but the url is shortened to goo.gl, which, of course, Google tracks ;)

You could achieve the same thing by using any URL shortener (like tiny url, etc).

I am hereby blaming this on Penguin (it seems like a good bandwagon to jump on at the moment). Curse you, Google, for taking away our SEO tools!

For those wondering about SSDs and failures, you need to understand that SSDs are just large Flash RAM arrays, just like USB thumb drives. They are designed to be semipermanent (meaning that, unlike their regular RAM brethren, they don't need power to store data) and, because they're not spinning platters, they are vastly faster than HDDs. The tradeoff is that they have a life span. So for something that high I/O but needs speed, you're looking at replacing new SSDs on a regular basis.